"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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Monday, November 12, 2012

Sore Loserman

"Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters hav a president to destroy America," Nugent wrote in the first of a storm tweets. "So Obama still demands the hardest workers provide for the nonwotkers. Shared opportunities my ass," he followed, before tweeting, "What subhuman varmint believes others must pay for their obesity booze cellphones birthcontrol abortions & lives."

Indeed. If Tom Paine were alive in our age of modern wonders, I'm sure he would have tweeted much the same missive, and then banged a 17-year-old groupie. Hey, the heart wants what it wants, amirite? Christ, it's like Nugent has some kind of weird bet going with Donald Trump, to see who can be the biggest fucking bozo on the planet.

Then there's this guy, who expends several thousand more words, couched in apocrypha, class-envy tropes, and allusions to classical Greek philosophers so's you know he reads something besides Fifty Shades of Grey, saying much the same thing. The takers voted to hold down the poor misbegotten makers and cornhole 'em, as portrayed in Atlas Smugged. Why, it's a miracle the producers haven't gone ahead and gone Galt on us thieving parasites already. And sweet jebus, but the comments make you long for the poetry of the article itself. Every commenter a bigger producer than the one before him, one must assume, none of them ever having taken so much as a sweet dime from the eeevil gubmint, even when hard times came a-knockin'.

Really, it's a right fuckin' miracle they've suffered those indignities for so long. It's as if Wall Street never lawn-darted the economy, and forced us not only to pay for the rebuild, but to give them bonuses for all their hard work. It's as if a wave of foreclosures and concomitant family murder-suicides all across the land never occurred. It's like the "job creators" didn't take their tax cuts and either sit on them in the Caymans, or invest them in Asia, and not create a damned thing in the good ol' U.S.A.
Look, I work in the public sector, so I'm not going to bullshit you -- I see plenty of able-bodied people looking for a handout, having kids they can't afford, not even pretending to look for a job, sporting fresh manicures and new 49ers swag and smart phones and nicer cars than I drive, etc., etc. The best I can tell you is that they really don't get enough "stuff" to get even a little bit ahead, maybe enough to get by if they happen to have a relative who isn't sick of their glomming bullshit yet.

But I also see a hell of a lot of folks who really have gotten the short end of life's big stick, who worked hard at jobs that packed up and left and hosed them out of a decent living, to save a couple of bucks. And now they'd take any job offered, but there aren't any. Or maybe their spouse got cancer and lingered, and sucked away their life savings on hospital visits. Any number of things. Shit really does happen, friends 'n' neighbors, and it is the mathematical certainty of a plutonomy that it happens in direct proportion to one's lack of resources to handle it.

I've talked to folks who were literally weeping in despair, not knowing whether it was even worth going on anymore, not knowing what to do or where to turn, ashamed at needing help but truly having no other resources. It happens, believe me. I'd love for Nugent and O'Reilly and their vulture capitalist corporate raiding candidate -- who got his butt handed to him not because Americans are lazy and grasping, but because he is, and a stone liar to boot -- to tell these people to their faces that they're whores and parasites. Seriously.

Longtime readers of this blog should be able to attest that, beyond the schtick and the jokes and sophomoric humor, I really am something of a curmudgeon and misanthrope. It's not a pose, though on the internets it is easy to embellish the stance a bit as needed. Suffice to say that I do not want to give the world a hug, and that while I am compassionate to the truly helpless, especially children and animals, I'm pretty much the opposite to able-bodied adults who, for one reason or another, can't or won't get out of their own way.

Having said that, even I find myself utterly appalled at people who have had every advantage and blessing in life, and are still so completely bereft of even basic human decency. That's not to say that they haven't worked hard for their fortunes -- even Rmoney, bless his pointy li'l head, has an actual skill. It can't be easy work figuring out how to financially rape American companies, send their workers down the road, pocket the difference, and still convince sentient human beings to give you the time of day, and look at you as if you didn't have the soul of an arsonist.

But that's the myth -- that hard work always equals success. And that's ludicrous; there are millions of folks out there busting their humps right this second, any given hour of any given day, who not only won't see the untold wealth of a Romney or a Trump, but can barely keep their heads above water. There's a lot of people out there working two jobs that are only a paycheck or two from the sidewalk, just a bad break at work, or a medical emergency for their child, or getting hit by an uninsured motorist. Any number of things.

Life in a plutonomy becomes more and more not just about being part of the Lucky Sperm Club (though that is an increasingly large part of it), but about luck in general. It's true that the harder you work, the luckier you usually get, but it's also true that you could very easily get bupkis for your toil and sweat.

And while it's bad enough for working-class mopes to forget that simple truism that they know firsthand, and do the chickens-voting-for-Colonel-Sanders shuffle, it's beyond pathetic for people who each have more money than several dozen people could reasonably spend in a lifetime, who have won life's lottery in so many ways, to so begrudge any and every crumb from their blessed table. Yes, god forbid the gubmint covers birth control pills, because we all know that Donald Trump and Mitt Romney and Sam Walton's heirs slaved 24/7/366 for their pelf, right?

I share the despair that the NRO guy writes so plaintively of, but not because of clueless limey socialism, but because there are so many people who actually buy this nonsense. I mean, do they somehow not know of anyone, have no friends or relatives, or relatives of friends, who have been laid off for no goddamned reason, or been downsized into penury at the drop of a hat, or had to roll the dice every day by not being able to afford even basic health care and insurance, or gone flat broke from health-care costs? Shit, within a mile of my house, at least a dozen (out of, I would estimate, maybe 150 within a 1-mile radius) houses went into foreclosure in 2007-8; most of them have been auctioned and are now rentals. How can these jerkoffs not know of anyone who got hit by a freight train of just sheer bad luck?

Sooner or later, these clowns all find out the hard way that, as George Carlin so memorably put it, it's a club and they ain't in it. I hope that greaseballs like Ted Nugent and Kid Rock and Meat Loaf understand that an impossibly uptight patrician like Mitt Romney wouldn't just cross the street to avoid them -- he'd have his limo driver circle the fuckin' block until they went about their way. And scrivening dogsbodies are a dime a gross, forget a mere dozen.

To the extent that people voted for Obama for a reason other than that he appeared to be the more human of the two choices proffered this time around, I would say that we really do want "stuff" -- stuff like safe roads and bridges; decent schools that don't teach creationist piffle in science class; pension funds that will actually be there when we retire, as opposed to being in some hedge fund manager's Hamptons digs; jobs that pay us enough to actually live on; health care that we can actually afford; a decent future for our children; the reassurance that a lifetime of actual honest-to-Trump elbow grease will fucking well pay off, not in tacky, pompous, gold-plated latrines with marble bidets, but just in not having to look over our shoulders every step of the way.

Is that too much to ask for? Apparently it is. It is not necessarily that the Ferrari driver in Cooke's (the NRO guy) story is a bastard for driving a Ferrari, it's that it's possible -- and increasingly likely, due to the sheer mathematical nature of plutonomy and engineered wealth disparity -- that he did something to get that Ferrari that he wouldn't want his parents to see him doing. Worse yet, it appears that said Ferrari driver is now not merely content with driving such a machine, he now feels the urge to compel all those who look upon him to attest to his inherent greatness.

What they don't seem to get is that we'd really just prefer they get on about whatever it is they do, and leave us peons to figure how to make do with what crumbs they allow us, however long that lasts.